“Journey of the Universe” is an hour-long documentary, previously aired on PBS, tracing, as the title implies, the history of the Universe. It begins at the “big bang” and tells the story of evolution of the universe, our planet, life, and human development. Throughout the documentary, host Brian Thomas Swimme, an “evolutionary philosopher,” (see bio here) projects a sense of awe and enthusiasm in relating the story. You can get a taste in a three-minute trailer here. This is an interesting documentary that gives an overview of this amazing journey. Unfortunately, near its end, the mood is shattered when Swimme devolves into doom-and-gloom environmental propaganda. This DVD serves as an introduction to the next.

“Journey of the Universe Conversations” is a four-DVD set containing 10 hours of interviews hosted by Mary Evelyn Tucker, an historian of religions (see bio here). There are 20 interviews. Interviews on the first two DVDs are those of scientists who relate, in more detail, the “Journey” of the documentary. DVDs three and four are populated mainly by non-scientist activists who are heavily into sustainable development and utopian environmental schemes. Most of the ideas expressed by these people have long been explored over the last 60 years or so in dystopian science fiction stories and found wanting. One interesting exception I found among this latter group, was Dr. David Begay, a physicist at Northern Arizona University, who related the way Navajos thought of the universe and related their “sense of place.”

These DVDs will be released on June 4, 2013 from most vendors. You can pre-order at Amazon here and here.

In this entertaining and informative book, Virginia Morell explores cognition of thought and emotions in animals. She sets the stage in the first paragraph of the introduction where she asserts:

“Animals have minds. They have brains, and use them, as we do: for experiencing the world, for thinking and feeling, and for solving the problems of life every creature faces. Like us, they have personalities, moods, and emotions; they laugh and they play. Some show grief and empathy, and are self-aware and very likely conscious of their actions and intents.”

I can attest to her assertion because, as a volunteer, I handle and interpret the natural history of birds of prey and snakes at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson and have experienced some of the attributes Morell describes. (Yes, even snakes have personalities).

But how do we really know that animals have these traits? Isn’t that just anthropomorphizing? In the introduction, Morell examines those questions and the evolution of our attitude toward animal cognition. Throughout the book she converses with current researchers and examines the writings of philosophers and other scientists.

The book’s ten chapters explore some attributes of ants, fish, birds, rats, elephants, dolphins, chimpanzees, dogs, and wolves. Each chapter presents some fascinating and surprising observations.

For example, study of the archer fish demonstrates that even animals with small simple brains can make cognitive decisions. Archer fish capture prey by knocking them down with a well-placed shot of water. They become better shots by watching the already skilled fish and by practicing. Dolphins have excellent short- and long-term memory and their echolocation is so acute that they can find very small objects hundreds of feet away.

Apparently dolphins can be sneaky. A dolphin in the Marine Life Oceanarium in Mississippi was trained to pick up litter in her tank in exchange for fish. She presented lots of trash. Upon investigation, engineers found that the dolphin accumulated a private stash of debris which she hid under a rock and retrieved a piece whenever she wanted fish.

Some research suggests that parrots assign contact calls, i.e., individual names, to their chicks.

Much of the research documented in this book can be considered controversial and Morell acknowledges that, but she puts things in perspective by citing supporting, on-going research and how it relates to the history of science. She does make a good case that animals are more intelligent than previously thought. She ends the epilogue with this bit of introspection:

“What do the minds of animals tell us about ourselves? That, like us, they think and feel and experience the world. That they have moments of anger, and sorrow, and love. Their animal minds tell us that they are our kin. Now that we know this, will our relationship with them change?”

This book is a good read; it is entertaining and thought-provoking. Morell is a professional science writer who contributes to National Geographic, Science, and Smithsonian and who has written several books.

Animal Wise is published by Crown Publishing and is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

I first heard of Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) in my beginning geology courses. A Pleistocene lake, Lake Agassiz, which covered parts of Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, and Minnesota, was named after Agassiz posthumously because of Agassiz’s research on glaciers in the Swiss Alps.

Aggasiz was born in Switzerland and educated there and in Germany, receiving a PhD. in 1829 in natural science, and a Doctorate in surgery and medicine in 1830, the later to please his Calvinist father.

In 1846 he moved to America where he became a professor of Zoology at Harvard, founded the Anderson School of Natural History near Cap Cod (one of the first coed colleges) that eventually became Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Agassiz was a passionate collector and established what would become the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He advertized far and wide for specimens, living or dead.

According to Irmsher, Agassiz was a complex man, a great friend to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and an arch-rival to Charles Darwin. He was a passionate scientist and part P.T. Barnum. And he had a dark side.

Irmsher writes that Agassiz’s story is “riven with the contradictions of a man who wanted to come across as both rigorously professional and unrelentingly popular, a man who believed that science practiced with due diligence could clear up not only the little problems that confounded the specialists but also the whole cosmic puzzle itself. Agassiz was one of the first to establish science as a collective enterprise. Yet he insisted on putting his own personal stamp on anything that came out of the museum he had founded and forbade his assistants to claim credit for any part of their own research done on company time. He was an ardent advocate of abolition, yet he also believed in the racial inferiority of blacks.”

Agassiz’s study of glaciers and fossils lead him to reject Darwin’s new theory of evolution. Rather, Agassiz was somewhat of a Creationist, but not as the term is currently used. Agassiz believed not in continuous evolution, but a series of creation events, in “oscillations,” where ice ages killed off everything and God created and recreated life anew.

Agassiz published over 400 books and scientific articles and was one of the first to propose that Europe and North America were once covered by glaciers. He was, however, a great proponent of field work, “study nature, not books.” He was also the consummate lecturer and his lectures were not confined to the classroom. His “popularity in America transcended class as well as regional boundaries.”

Irmsher spins an interesting story of a complex man based largely upon abundant correspondence from Agassiz, his contemporaries, and his wife and sister.

One of Agassiz’s great strengths was his ability to explain science to the layman. Irmsher writes in the epilogue, “as Louis Agassiz drifts into the sunset of this narrative, it is worth remembering how his struggles, problems, and aspirations are still with us. Yes, we haven’t moved beyond his biases and blindnesses as much as much as we would like to think we have, but that isn’t all. In my view, Louis Agassiz was never more provocative than when he argued science ought to be part of the general fabric of society.” I agree. More emphasis on science is needed in general education.

If you are interested in the history of science, its development and its characters, you will be interested in the story of Louis Agassiz.

The book is available is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and is available at Amazon as a hardcover book (to be released Feb. 5) and a Kindle edition. It is also available from Barnes & Noble.